Electronic mail, often abbreviated to e-mail, email, or originally eMail, is a store-and-forward method of writing, sending, receiving and saving messages over electronic communication systems. The term “e-mail” applies to the Internet email system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, to network systems based on other protocols and to various mainframe, minicomputer, or internet by a particular systems vendor, or on the same protocols used on public networks.
Email is a widely utilized communication tool in the computer network environment. Email is an especially critical business tool for communication in large, geographically-distributed organizations. These large organizations are frequently challenged with keeping track of personnel who are available to work or respond to issues as the issues arise. These issues are oftentimes communicated from one person to the other within the organization via email and the recipient of the email is then expected to respond to or resolve the issue.
To help email senders know which email receivers are available to work or to respond to issues sent via email, most email systems contain an “out-of-office” notification function. This function alerts an email sender if the recipient is not going to be checking email for a specific period of time, perhaps due to an illness or a vacation, and often includes a return date or end date. Sending email to a recipient who has enabled the out-of-office notification function triggers a return from the recipient's email system of a designated email message/notification to the sender. This notification allows the sender to take other action. For example, if the sender's email contains time sensitive information that must be handled before the recipient's return date, the sender is able to re-route the request to another person within the organization.
With the present out of office notification function, the sender often does not remember the recipient's return date or may not be given a return date, and the sender may periodically send an email to the recipient, only to receive a new out of office notification. This is particularly true when a recipient has set the out-of-office function for an extended period of time. If the sender has time-sensitive communication that must be addressed and there is a second or backup person (other then the out-of-office recipient) who is capable of responding to the sender's email request, the sender may lose valuable time through the redundant actions of resending and repeatedly receiving multiple out-of-office notifications before taking appropriate action.
Moreover, email recipients experience overflow of mail in their mailboxes with unread email after a few days of the out-of-office function being used, with limited or no access to their email. Very few prior art methods focus on management of mailboxes with the objective of reducing the amount of emails filling up the recipient's mailbox. Most prior art email management solutions focus on archiving and redistribution of incoming emails and result in producing more emails or copies of emails, not fewer.
An example of one prior art email retraction system, set forth in U.S. Publication No. US20050223064, which is hereby incorporated by reference, which provides the sender the option of retracting a message. This retraction can occur locally before it is sent as well as at the server side, but it is based on the decision of the sender, only.
There remains a need to provide recipients of emails with methods and systems to control the build-up or excess of email in one's mailbox.